A virtual Osama bin Laden, recruiting jihadis? It's not such a crazy notion

US intelligence's fear of supervillain avatars sounds outlandish – but there's a solid precedent for using video games as political weapons

'Imagine having a virtual reality headset superglued to your face and being obliged to watch a version of David Cameron ranting about Romanians for days on end.' Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian David Sillitoe/Guardian

Keeping tabs on virtual congregations of al-Qaida types is apparently one of the main reasons why, as documents released by Edward Snowden last month showed, American spies have for years been infiltrating online games such as World of Warcraft and Second Life. It will no doubt be disappointing to learn that the cute elf you were chatting with in WoW was almost certainly a CIA agent. Meanwhile, it now seems likely that the vast majority of the population of Second Life are either professional spooks or academic researchers in the digital humanities. They probably have a lot to talk about.

Using video games as political weapons is not new. The US military itself released a free game, America's Army, as a recruiting tool in 2002, and long before that had commissioned specialised versions of video games as training simulators. The US intelligence report notes this history, as well as propaganda games made by Syria and Hezbollah, but forgets to pat America on the back for the purely voluntary and commercial existence of the mega-selling Call of Duty shooter franchise, which is nothing if not one long ultraviolent advert for the heroism and sensitivity of US soldiering all over the planet and well into the future. When that is grossing billions, who needs official propaganda?

As for a virtual Osama bin Laden: well he had effectively been a virtual figure for years – appearing so rarely in video and audiotapes of indeterminate provenance that according to some intelligence analysts he was dead – before he was disposed of bodily in the 2011 mission to "kill or capture" him. Indeed, many American players of online shooters had gleefully adopted Osama bin Laden avatars after George W Bush first declared the "war on terror" in 2001. Not inappropriately, web satirists gleefully doctored the photograph of Barack Obama watching the Bin Laden operation's feed by Photoshopping a videogame joypad into his hands.

The idea of a new Robo Bin Laden – a cyber-supervillain who could, in the report's estimate, "preach and issue fatwas for hundreds of years to come" – sounds outlandish, but research on the psychology of online avatars shows they could be put to troubling use. In his forthcoming book, The Proteus Paradox, Nick Yee explains that people act differently both online and offline depending on what kind of avatar they are given to play with in a virtual space. And they like other avatars more if those avatars' faces have been imperceptibly blended with their own faces.

Yee even hypothesises that such tricks could be deployed in a "persuasion chamber" to forcibly change minds, in a dystopian blend of The Matrix with A Clockwork Orange. Imagine having a virtual reality headset superglued to your face and being obliged to watch a version of David Cameron who subtly resembles you ranting about Romanians for days on end. Even the toughest of us might eventually crack and become puce-cheeked migration obsessives. But then again, can we be absolutely sure that the Cameron we see on TV isn't a virtual-reality simulation already?